"Through our joint partnership with Facebook we are committed to helping marketers fully leverage social media to build their brands."

Right away a red flag went up. Honest researchers aren't "committed" to anything other than reporting the truth. Researchers with agendas and commitments aren't doing research, they're doing advocacy.

It just kept getting worse. In the report itself, they state...

"We have now conducted six months of research consisting of... more than 125 individual Facebook advertising campaigns from 70 brand advertisers..."

The implication is that this study is the result of all that research. Otherwise, why mention it?

It's not until four pages later that we learn...

"For the purposes of this case study, we examined the impact of Facebook advertising on 14 campaigns...Campaigns selected were representative of more successful campaigns ..."

WHAT?

In other words, of the "more than 125 individual Facebook advertising campaigns" they have studied, they only picked 14 of the top performers for this "case study" (and notice how it has mutated from an "important new study" to a "case study" so they have a loophole to crawl through when this baloney hits the fan.)

So, let's recap. You take only the top 11% of the campaigns, you ignore all the failures and all the mediocrities, you analyze only these top performers and you present the results as if they prove something?

"This study demonstrates that advertising in the social context works for brands and works well."

This isn't research. This is a new business pitch.

Update:
For a more mathematically oriented interpretation of the Nielsen/Facebook study, I recommend this from Ben Kunz at Thought Gadgets.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."